Practical Distributed Control for Cooperative Multicopters in Structured Free Flight Concepts

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are now becoming increasingly accessible to amateur and commercial users alike. Several types of airspace structures have been proposed in recent research, which include several structured free flight concepts. In this paper, for simplicity, distributed coordination of the motions of cooperative multicopters in structured airspace concepts is focused on. This is formulated as a free flight problem, including convergence to destination lines/planes and inter-agent collision avoidance. The destination line of each multicopter is known a priori. Further, Lyapunov-like functions are designed elaborately, while formal analysis and proofs of the proposed distributed control are given to show that the free flight control problem can be solved. What is more, by the proposed controller, a multicopter can keep away from another as soon as possible once it enters the safety area of another one. Simulations and experiments are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.